Charlie Hillier

Indistinguishable mitochondrial phenotypes after exposure of healthy myoblasts to myalgic encephalomyelitis or control serum Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME)/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a disease of uncertain aetiology that affects up to 400,000 individuals in the UK. Exposure of cultured cells to the sera of people with ME has been proposed to cause phenotypic changes in these cells in vitro when compared to sera from healthy controls. ME serum factors causing these changes could inform the development of diagnostic tests. In this study, we performed a large-scale, pre-registered replication of an experiment from Fluge et al (2016) that reported an increase in maximal respiratory capacity in healthy myoblasts after treatment with serum from people with ME compared to serum from healthy controls. We replicated the original experiment with a larger sample size, using sera from 67 people with ME and 53 controls to treat healthy cultured myoblasts, and generated results from over 1,700 mitochondrial stress tests performed with a Seahorse Bioanalyser. We observed no significant differences between treatment with ME or healthy control sera for our primary outcome of interest, oxygen consumption rate at maximal respiratory capacity. Results from our study provide strong evidence against the hypothesis that ME blood factors differentially affect healthy myoblast mitochondrial phenotypes in vitro. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Action for ME, https://ror.org/0569v7v35, Clare Francis Research Fellowship

1/2 New pre-print: We performed a large-scale replication testing the effect of serum from 67 pwME and 53 healthy donors on muscle cell mitochondria, revealing no significant differences. This suggests earlier results may not be true for people with ME in general. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Frontiers | Deep sequencing of BCR heavy chain repertoires in myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome

Pleased to share this research from my PhD in @graemecowan.bsky.social's lab! We replicated existing evidence of moderately increased IGHV3-30 usage in B cells of patients with mild/moderate, but not severe ME. www.frontiersin.org/journals/imm...

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"I’m trying to understand whether there are factors in the blood of ME patients that are different from healthy individuals."

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Help for today, hope for tomorrow ME is a long term, neurological disease affecting hundreds of thousands - yet there is still no test, no effective …

@actionforme.bsky.social are running their Big Give campaign this week to raise money for ME and ME research, with matched donations up to Monday! AfME have been supporting Audrey Ryback's important research on blood factors in ME. Do consider donating and sharing! donate.biggive.org/campaign/a05...